The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights management blog posts 3 times each month. I have also collected hundreds of online management improvement articles in the Curious Cat Management Library.

• Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers by Mark Cuban – “Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happen. Listen to them. Make them happy. But they won’t create the future roadmap for your product or service. That’s your job.”
• Pure Genius: Southwest Airlines Baggage Strategy by Eric Joiner – “Consistently sized aircraft, carefully selected destinations and a desire to compete with the big guys only where they can win, has made Southwest profitable where the big guys have failed.”
• Evolutionary operation by Mark J. Anderson – “a manufacturing improvement method called evolutionary operation (EVOP), which calls for an ongoing series of two-level factorial designs that illuminate a path to more desirable conditions.”
• Why do we use Kanban? by David Anderson – “(1) Evolutionary, incremental change with minimal resistance (2) Achieve sustainable pace by balance throughput against demand (3) Quantitative Management and emergence of high maturity behavior in alignment with senior management desire to have a highly predictable business (4) Better risk management (the emerging theme in the Kanban community)”
• MBWA is Not a Gemba Walk by Kevin Meyer – “What if the top executive led groups of people in spontaneous kaizen activities. Teaching, creating, changing. Not just sneaking around and watching.”
• W.L. Gore: Lessons from a Management Revolutionary by Gary Hamel – Terri Kelly: “Our leaders have positions of authority because they have followers. Rather than relying on a top-down appointment process, where you often get promoted because you have seniority, or are the best friend of a senior executive, we allow the voice of the organization to determine who’s really qualified to be a leader, based on the willingness of others to follow.”
• How a Simple Office Kanban System Works by Mark Graban – “In setting up a system like this, you just have to be careful that the 2nd bin has enough inventory to last you until the new stock arrives. If you order weekly and the material arrives the day after, the re-order quantity really needs to be six days worth of supply.”

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The Curious Cat Management blog carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• The 7 Software Development Wastes by Jack Milunsky – “1) Keep your stories small, and unambiguous. 2) Ensure that each story has well defined acceptance test criteria (assisted by input from the customer). 3) Ensure that your code is well tested. Adopting good Test Driven Development habits will pay back in spades…”
• Strengths, Weaknesses, Your Team, and You – “Help your people be more successful by helping them develop their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant. Help your team be more successful by developing the most effective mix of task assignments.”
• Plan Vs. Actual – The Swiss Army Knife of Charts by Mark R. Hamel – “The plan vs. actual also spurs PDCA in that the worker is required to identify the root cause of the abnormal condition and ultimately points the worker, team and leadership to effective countermeasures.”
• Don’t build a roofless home: 3 steps to successfully implementing Counter Measures by JC Gatlin – “Set up a ‘PDCA Implementation Review’ with the entire PDCA group one or two days following the final TARGET date. This should be a simple, short conference call – no more than 15 minutes.”
• How Google sets goals and measures success by Don Dodge – “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary – Setting impossible goals and achieving part of them sets you on a completely different path than the safe route. Sometimes you can achieve the impossible in a quarter, but even when you don’t, you are on a fast track to achieving it soon”
• Creating Employee Engagement, Part 4 by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Team members must be able to engage in brainstorming, experimentation, and communication to be able to develop, share, and decide on solutions to problems… Skills make this succeed or fail.

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